dejv

It happen to me once. Company I worked for was acquired by competitor, our product was not offered to new customer anymore and it was decided to shut down majority of development team. I was quite unfortunate as I had to switch from contractor to full time position that day so no severance package for me and I was told to not come back next day (other devs stayed for next few months doing nothing).

It was early in my career, I had no obligation and I was thinking about moving to London anyway. So I took it as a sign, returned back to my office, book a flight for next week, said good bye and left.

Being young and having valuable skillset it never felt like some bad event. It was sad to say good bye, but hey there are tons of challenges out there.

My favorite from the list is Traction. It is quite short and it clearly fit the type of person that I am: Developer who like to sit down and create some products, but haven't really thought about channels and distribution systematically before.

As another Czech person and former PM of another security product I guess there are two main factors in play:

1. Tech factor: amount of HW and SW what could be exported into Eastern bloc was very limited so people who worked with computers were all very confortable with low level work as getting anything else than bare computer was almost impossible.

2. Business factor: there was close to 0 money available in Easter bloc (= 40 years of comunism destroyed all personal equity as all property from previous generation was confiscated and your earning potential was very limited) so when you started software company you needed sales channel that didn't require much hand holding. Antiviruses are great because you could use listings on download sites and the product is culture agnostic.

In US your best bet in 90s was to create consumer or enterprise SW company. But imagine being in Czech republic: you don't understand the US culture to get into home of people and you don't have access to capital and institutional knowledge to build enterprise SW (no way you was going to afford opening US office on money availale in this region). But hey, no problem writing AV software, then upload it to download.com and then collect payments.

Also those AV companies took so long to take off: Avast was created in late 80s and it took them around 15 years to get any traction. Being in region with more opportunities you probably give up and try something else.

Of course that is work, but not job and definitely not a career. What do you think you are going to do when you get basic income?

In my case when somebody asked me and I haven't have had much going on I did it, but I haven't chased anything.

I am with you, I don't know why people are so scared about not going to work.

Due to some lucky events I was able to maintain some fairly large custom ERP system. After few inital years all the big problems were fixed and I was keeping eye on it for next 10 years. In reality it meant about 1 or 2 hours of work every (other) month and I was paid enough to be confortable, not that much, but enough to live the life I wanted. Kind of universal income reality.

What do you think? Did I missed going to the office? Was I depressed because I haven't been climbing corporate ladder? Nah, it was awesome.

I spent few years traveling, I worked on more then 50 projects (SW and HW), I tried to launch few startups and helped couple VC funded companies, I've even bought farm and and was fortunate to spend a few years with my newly born kids without constantly thinking about some deadlines that was not imposed by me. I never felt like I was wasting my life, quite oposite: I had so much time for exploring various projects and learn new skill and I didn't need to think about will-that-make-it-me-some-money type of questions.

I am currently working normal job (well, it remote and 4-days a week, but still) writing software for banks, telcos and other corporations and it just didn't filled me with purpose or self-actualisation.

I do, but they still use enterprise grade servers that each cost almost as much as my house.

Even having access to the source code might not be enough: I’ve seen cases of weirdly forked repos with custom additions and half baked backports that relied on hacked system libraries and weird mix of specific legacy packages in some symbiotic way that just one specific laptop of some long gone developer was able to compile it and virtual machine of this Windows XP was passed around.

Oh yeah storage is huge part of what determine final price: for investment grade wines you need to proof that you store it in proper place with reputable vendor. those places are not cheap and will eat into your margin.

Big problem with wine collections is transfering stock into money. Selling big stashes is not going to be easy and cheap.

And at the end they would offer you 20 or maybe just maybe 30 USD/hour maximum. And with hour they do mean billable hour.

I love that book as well as Making of Karateka (his previous game), I read both books for 5 times and each time when I started to have doubts about my decision to be indie developer (not doing games anymore) and when I started to think about finding a job after almost two decades without any success it did renew my energy to continue.

The book for me is about spirit of working on your own projects, about curiosity and passion on whatever you choose to pursuit.

Tube amps are also much more dangerous than 9V battery operated headphone amps. For people that are just starting out those cmoy style projects are awesome. btw there is also 1W guitar amp in style of cmoy.

Terry Pratchett wrote a book about newspappers that is even more relevant in current age of social media. It is called The Truth.

I had quite a lot of failures, but one of the most interesting was/is my software for managing wineries.

Go niche they said and I did. I also picked real pain point: doing compliance tracking in EU is ridiculous process and it is often called as a biggest burden of wineries.

It turned out that small to mid sized wineries really hate doing paperwork, but they dont like to do it on computer as well. So after four years I found being in limited marked with product that my customers seeing more like necessary evil and with high cost of getting new people converting to core users.

Once they did convert they tend to stay for years (zero churn for customers that make effort to start using it systematically).

I do have some customers and I do keep the doors open, I even do additional development as I see fit, but I dont see bright future for the product. Four years of fulltime work went into building it, but hey thats how it goes.

You might want to try cutting clove in half and remove that green/off colored part in the middle. It does help with stomach hurts.

Not just regional, but also tribal. I was firmly in C64 camp and we always make fun of ZX owners or Sharpists and vice versa. It is silly looking back two dacedas, but hey we were all “kids” back then.

It is interesting how biggest flamewars are always between groups of people that are most in common and exclude rest of general public.

Few years ago I've bought few plots of vineyards and started to make my own wine. I was lucky that many members of my familly is making wine for many years already (like few 100s of years) so I was able to borrow some equipment and get help sometimes.

It is generating some money, but I am in the process of professionalising whole business and that costs HUGE amount of money so I basically invest all of my earnings and will continue to do so for next decade(s).

Being born into winemaking familly was big gift and a curse. Without having some basic infrastructure there is no way I would be able to afford starting. On the other hand it brings complex familly issues when you try to do something different: I am farming organically, I refuse to use any "modern" additives and even stylistically I prefer doing very dry old-school type of wine instead of what they thought is modern off-dry and semi-sweet wine.

Another niche is control software for industrial/laboratory instruments. I know about FTIR spectroscopes, huge weaving machines or system that call you by number when you are at office, bank or post office.

My favourite method for distributing software was hapening during 80s on Czechoslovak television, there was some tech/computer show and at the end, during credits they play sound that when you record it (and was lucky) you’ve got some small game or something.

Checkout this Minecraft clone: https://github.com/fogleman/Craft

It is not tutorial, but the code is very clean and readable and it use modern techniques (compared to Wold3D/Doom style raycasters). The codebase could be extended easily.

I bet there is some technical reason behind allowing just few architectures and I hope they will fix it in future releases. Currently you can't even run ResNet type of networks on it.

I did work on optical sorting machine: you have stream of fruits on very fast conveyor belt and then machine vision system scans the passing fruits, detects each object and reject (by firing stream of air) those that don't pass: those can be molded fruits, weird color or foreign material like rocks or leaves. 100 fps might be enough, but faster you go, faster your conveyor belt could be.

As a person with access to their documentation I can confirm that this is currently the only way to compile model for this TPU. Also list of supported network architectures is very very short.

Well this is just begining I am sure they are going to expand its capability.

It is not just US, also in Europe it seems like the hitchhiking is dead. 15 years ago when I was criss crossing Europe many times hitchhiking, sleeping in hostels but usually just in the ditch next to the road or field nearby. I used to meet tons of hitchhikers almost anywhere you go.

Today I am not hitchhiking anymore, but I am happy to give a ride to anybody flagging finger. For past three years that happens only once and even those two people were doing it just because of some hitchhiking competition.

Yes, we do have nice park just outside our house and there is also forest with a lot of hiking trails in walking distance. I try to bring my kids out every day, our 2 years old can easily walk 10 km now. Also trip to grocery store is like 3km and I do shop every day. It adds up quickly.

Freelance developer, based in Europe. In my 30s, two kids and working from home.

I do work 4 days a week (+ 1 or 2 days a week working on my farm). Working from 8:30 till 4pm and having 1.5 hours break to cook for my familly and we eat together.

I guess my business hours looks short, but it consist of focused time only: no browsing web, no facebook, twitter or other social network, no calls and definitely no meetings.

Rest of my time is generaly spent with my family. I dont really do any exercise but I still manage to walk 10 a 15 kms a day + manual work on my farm.

My grandmother was survivor and died few months ago as 95 years old. To be honest I havent seen any radical independence traits or much impact caused by that period, she was around 20 when in camp which might help as body and mind might heal better while young. She had nice and quiet life as farmer, retired as 75 years old doing hard work in freezing cold or under hot sun every single day. She used bicycle each day till 88 or something.

Somebody mentioned gulag, my grandfather was send there as political prisoner, working in uran mines. His health was impacted and he died relatively early.

I always had hobies: I used to be into live music A LOT: I went out to gigs like 5 or 6 times a week, then there was always some friends around, wine tastings, mountain hiking or random trips on weekends. I have small kids now, so I dont go out very often but there is always hiking on weekends and I spend one day a week on my wine farm.

Since our first kid was born, so for them it is just natural way of life.

I do work from home and am father of two small kids (3 and 1 years), both kids and my wife are stayign at home.

From the begining we set strict rules: my office is off place: nobody except of me can go inside, kids are taught that when I am inside I am not home and they just can't see me. I am also not going inside my office outside of my business hours.

With those rules in place it feels like having office outside with minimal commute.